Dining room decline

anonymous //January 25, 2017

Often in research, we ask consumers what they want to buy and at what price. But just as telling is what consumers feel they do not need.

According to research conducted by Furniture Today, 33% of consumers stated they could easily live without a dining room. The office is the second highest room consumers feel they could live without at 16%. As for furniture, 37% of consumers could most easily live without the formal dining room table, followed by the sideboard/buffet, another dining room staple, at 28%.

It seems the formal dining room is on the decline. Additional research from Furniture Today’s Furniture Store Performance Report shows that the median price point for formal dining room sets is decreasing as well, down 12.5% from 2015 to 2016. Furniture Today’s Furniture Store Performance Report from 2006 indicates that share of sales of formal dining room has decreased 75% in the last ten years, while percentage of sales floor has only decreased 20%.

However, it is not all bad news. Research from Gallup indicates that most U.S. families still eat together: 53% of families with children under the age of 18 say they eat together six to seven nights a week at home, which is unchanged from 2001. And according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 51% of new houses from 2005 to 2009 included a dining room, a number that has not significantly declined for decades.

The question then becomes, if most homes have dining rooms, but people say they could live without them, what is going on? It seems, looking at anecdotal evidence, that people are using their dining rooms either for other purposes or for multiple purposes. Everyone from Bob Vila to the L.A. Times to The Land of Nod have written about ideas on how to use that space for more functional purposes.

The formal dining room may be going out of fashion, but it is not disappearing altogether. Homes are still built with dining rooms and areas for eating, but consumers may be looking for more function out of those rooms, and, hence, more function from their dining furniture.